Provenance: Provenance: Hiraya Gallery

ABOUT THE WORK

This work is among many done by Justiniani which are in themselves unique as signs on the literal and figurative level. They are crafted as signages (decals and stickers) of the local jeepney, the country’s most popular public transport hewn from the surplus of combat, the willy’s jeep of World War II, and therefore convey a folk-popular sensibility galvanized by repair and recovery. These signs are vessels on their own. In conventional use, they popularize bawdy and sexist jokes, but in the appropriation of Justiniani, they peel the layers of the social system that makes the humor possible and critique it through the very means by which laughter is made potent: kitsch, parody, military and even scatology depending on how one takes it. The everyday world is one in which there are myriad hidden messages through which the artist Mark Justiniani reflects upon the complexities of the world. His art is as rich in its challenges for the viewer whose desire is for a subtler understanding of the world. Reinforcing these methods is the mirror that reflects images faithfully, but rather treacherously, as words recall history or draw some sinister nexus between seemingly discrepant terms. The engagement, therefore, between image and the technology of reflection is not locked in imitation or repetition, or the anxiety or burden of authenticity, but in critique and circumvention. Justiniani mobilizes a different mode of mimetic interface, one that undermines the aspiration of reflection to capture coherence — and consequently celebrates contradiction and the art of rightful subterfuge. As mirrors square off, the library of words repressed in any by history that lurks in the woodwork of language are ferreted out and bought to the clearing and into the light of nearly serendipitous but ostensibly calculated research.